Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future and former Chair of the Green Party, has laid out a model for thinking about sustainable living in his new book entitled ‘The World We Made’, telling the retrospective story of environmental change from the perspective of a history teacher, Alex McKay, in 2050. I spoke to him about public and political attitutudes towards climate policy, raising environmental awareness, and his work at Forum for the Future.

Why is your model laid out in this form of narrative?

One of the major problems about trying to communicate ‘the world of sustainability’ is that it is invariably full of doom and gloom – and most people find this incredibly difficult to deal with! By going out to 2050, and then looking back to see how we got to such a good world in 2050, it’s possible to give people…